Zoom Communications (Zoom) has become one of the world’s leading collaboration applications. From its launch as a video conferencing tool, the solution has matured to become an all-in-one, AI-first work platform that can inform contact centers, track customer and employee sentiment, help drive revenue growth, and act as every worker’s personal assistant.
Challenge
Today’s knowledge workers face a firehose of data, including e-mails, direct messages, conference calls, collaboration tools, and more. Managing it all and differentiating what is critical and actionable versus what is lower priority can be challenging. “In our daily life, we have lots of repetitive and administrative work that you don’t want to spend time on,” says Bo Yan, Head of Product, AI, Zoom. In fact, on average, employees spend 41 percent of their workday on work considered low value, repetitive work.1 The good news: new services, powered by artificial intelligence and advanced computing hardware, offer solutions.
Solution
With AI Companion and a host of powerful new tools for enterprises, Zoom is now moving beyond videoconferencing. It aims to be an all-in-one AI-first work platform that can inform contact centers, track customer and employee sentiment, help drive revenue growth, and act as every worker’s personal assistant.
“With all the repetitive work being taken care of by your AI assistant, you can focus on human communication and creativity.” —Bo Yan, Head of Product, AI, Zoom
Zoom AI Companion’s newest capabilities, introduced in March 2025, lean heavily into agentic AI. Going beyond basic tasks, these agentic tools can reason and automatically orchestrate events, such as scheduling meetings, tracking action items, and planning follow-ups. Serving as an AI-enabled executive assistant, Zoom AI Companion can heighten the impact of human-to-human communication through tools that capture verbatim meeting transcripts, as well as the context, meaning, and nuance that are essential to understanding.
Zoom AI Companion is embedded across the platform, including:
- Zoom Docs
- Zoom Meetings
- Zoom Team Chat
- Zoom Contact Center
- Zoom Whiteboard
- Zoom Workflow Automation
AI Companion helps workers capture, interpret, prioritize, and act on information from multiple sources, live and asynchronously. For consistency across applications, these services all call on the same data sets, with one memory and one history. To drive its AI Companion capabilities, Zoom uses a federated approach to AI, combining the capabilities of leading, third-party models with its homegrown AI—including its “small” language models, which employ as many as 2 billion parameters. The Zoom AI Companion is an open platform, so that enterprises can connect with tools outside of Zoom. For privacy and security reasons, Zoom does not use customer content to train its models.
Co-innovation is the Secret to Success
Intel engineers worked closely with their counterparts at Zoom to optimize how Zoom’s software runs on Intel® architecture-based systems, including laptops, desktops, and servers. The partnership dates back to 2019, when the two companies initially focused on improving the performance of features like virtual backgrounds, background blurring, speech recognition, and noise suppression. The collaboration has grown to include optimizing Zoom AI Companion on Intel® hardware, whether users are accessing AI services from the cloud, running them locally on AI PCs, or relying on a combination of the two.
“We are going to bring people together, help them collaborate, and get work done in a much more efficient way. We’re really helping to transform from meetings to milestones, from conversation to completion.” —Xuedong Huang, Chief Technology Officer, Zoom
Zoom AI Companion combines edge and cloud intelligence in a seamless way, relying on Intel’s latest processors, which are purpose-built to give AI a boost.
Edge processing: The latest Intel® Core™ Ultra processors for notebooks and desktops are genuine AI powerhouses, designed to enhance AI workloads through multiple accelerators: the neural processing unit (NPU) for power efficiency, the graphical processing unit (GPU) for high throughput, and the CPU for low latency. These components work in tandem to handle AI tasks locally and efficiently, helping to deliver optimal performance with longer battery life.
“Intel has been a strategic partner for AI across our client and cloud offerings. Intel's innovations are going to help us really improve the efficiency in a cohesive way.” —Xuedong Huang, Chief Technology Officer, Zoom
For locally run services, Zoom’s software includes hooks that tap the power of the NPU, which accelerates processing and throughput of AI-related computations. This not only speeds things up but also helps manage power consumption, which can be an issue for organizations that employ AI broadly. Zoom has collaborated with Intel to optimize performance by balancing efficiency, latency, and battery power. By utilizing the strengths of each accelerator, Intel provides a seamless and robust environment for all Zoom users.
Cloud-based AI: For cloud-based functions, such as inferencing, Zoom’s AI Companion uses Intel® technology that scales across the data center. Intel® Xeon® 6 processors with Performance-cores (P-cores) power the most demanding workloads with AI acceleration built into every core. Intel® Gaudi® AI accelerators focus on specific AI tasks, like fine-tuning and inference. Zoom AI Companion also leverages assets like Intel® Extension for PyTorch to improve the performance of deep learning models.
“I had a dream one day that everyone can have more time to interact with people, work happier, and maybe even work less.” —Bo Yan, Head of Product, AI, Zoom
Results
Zoom AI Companion fuels a future in which AI plays a more prominent role in the workplace, giving human workers superpowers to create and innovate. Zoom executives believe that AI Companion will help drive better decisions and faster task completion, whether it’s in healthcare, chemistry, quantum computing, or nearly any other industry. It’s Zoom’s vision that everyone can have more time to interact with people, work happier, and maybe even work less.